Goat Simulator GoatZ Review: A No Brainer

The
Good

Survival mode offers a new challenge for Goat Simulator veterans.

The
Bad

Lots of physics-based glitches.

A very unpolished experience overall.

Last September I reviewed the original Goat Simulator. While I wasn’t necessarily the game’s target audience, I did appreciate the game for what it was: a silly little time-killer that allowed players to control a goat and move about a small town getting into all sorts of mischief.

Lots — and I mean lots — of people decided to give Goat Simulator a try in the last year. The game’s success prompted the developers to release a new chapter in the Goat Simulator legacy: Goat Simulator GoatZ.

Goat Simulator GoatZ is a DayZ-influenced spin on the original Goat Simulator. Now there are zombies, crafting, a survival game mode, and more things for players to play around with as a silly little goat.

The big draw with GoatZ is the inclusion of zombies. Unfortunately A.I. wasn’t a strength of the original Goat Simulator, and things are no different this time around. Zombies (and the regular people, too) commonly get stuck running in place, or not even reacting at all. Bumping into them may send them flying thanks to the game’s completely unstable physics, or it could cause your goat to flop over like it just gave up on life.

He’s running in place, I’m levitating…business as usual.

I get that part of the charm of Goat Simulator is that the game is just…well, broken. The physics are ridiculous and things that should never happen, happen quite frequently, but I’m only willing to let the “being broken is part of the game” excuse go so far. There were times where I fell through the level and had to restart the game. I went exploring once and found a part of the island that was never finished and left wide open. Other times my goat would get stuck on something in the game and the physics engine seemingly flung up its hands in defeat and sent my goat flying.

The experience as a whole was frustrating, because no matter what I tried to do, the game bogged me down in some way.

The new elements, namely the crafting and survival modes, offer very little to the overall gameplay of Goat Simulator. The crafting elements simply involve the player finding two items, opening up a menu, and tapping a button to construct one of the six weapons. The weapon is then used to neutralize zombies in a creative way, but thanks to the mobile version’s watered down (and I mean watereddown) graphics, the weapons are less than impressive to behold. By the time you’ve clumsily lined up the goat with a zombie, you’ll realize it would have just been easier to ignore the zombie and just run by it.

The survival mode takes the open world of Goat Simulator and requires the player to find food to eat in order to avoid starving to death. Food is found in the same supply crates that you can find parts to craft weapons with. After awhile it becomes hard to find crates after you’ve cleared out most of them, so the survival mode does offer some new challenges to players looking for something beyond the regular sandbox mode.

While GoatZ features some new elements, it’s main element is still that the game remains largely a wonky mess of physics glitches, and the charm that came with the original game is fading very quickly.